RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) technology is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in the national supply chain. RFID technology offers a hope of major improvements in productivity. Unlike barcodes, they are capable of being scanned in bulk, even if they are hidden from plain sight. In the supply chain, bulk packaged goods, arriving, say on a pallet, can be accounted for and logged into the receivable accounts. At the retail checkout counter, an entire shopping basket can be scanned and the charges accumulated. Shoppers leaving a store can be checked for inventory which does not match the payment made.
For all their versatility however, RFID, regardless of manufacturer or technology employed, can be cloned. Given sufficient financial incentive, any RFID chip or device can be cloned. The technology to create the chips and antennas is widespread, and the incentives to do so are large. A good example is the pharmaceuticals industry, which is moving to RFID for tracking drugs in the supply chain. A sealed pallet might contain a thousand vials of a drug, and some drugs are very expensive. The incentives are great to produce fake drugs, which, when carefully labeled by cloned RFID will be accepted at a receiving site as genuine. Once a particular RFID has been duplicated, it is a straight-forward process to make copies of the responses of valid RFID. However, it may not even be necessary to manufacture an RFID clone. Given the incentives, it's possible that an insider attack at the original manufacturer of the RFID could be successful in obtaining useable cloned RFID.